'Have you heard of Sir Charles Wolseley's letter to Lord Castlereagh? I fell upon it to-day in the Times, and copy for your astonishment this paragraph: "I beg leave to inform your lordship that, if his Majesty's government will allow me a month's leave of absence from my present place of confinement, I will undertake to be of the utmost service to her "Majesty in the pending prosecution against her, by going from hence to Como, where, during the year 1817, I lived several months with my family; and from that circumstance, and being acquainted with several people who were employed by the queen, I have an opportunity of getting at evidence that would be of the greatest consequence, that no Englishman but myself and a Mr. Walter Landon, who is now in Italy, can have had the same opportunity of knowing." You probably know that one of Brougham's brothers has been on the Continent beating up for witnesses. If this letter had appeared in time, no doubt he would have gone in search of you, and I should like to have been present at the interview. Sir Ch. W. must be half crazy. We may judge how capable he is of forming a sane opinion upon any subject, when he has so topsyturvy a recollection of your knowledge upon this. His letter, of course, has not obtained the slightest notice, and therefore none can be needful on your part. Had the mention of your name been such as in any way to compromise you, I should without hesitation have written to the newspapers. Most persons seem to apprehend that this trial will not terminate without some violent explosion. Certain it is that every possible art is used for making the mob rise in open rebellion. But though it is very possible to foresee the consequence of public opinions, public madness must baffle all foresight; and this is an absolute insanity. It was well observed by an acquaintance of mine the other day, upon hearing that Bedlam was to be enlarged, "Enlarge Bedlam, indeed! Better build a wall round "London !"'

Sir Charles Wolseley was sufficiently notorious in those days, but now nobody remembers him. Few of us have even read about the meeting of fifteen thousand non-electors in the summer of 1819, who elected him their legislatorial attorney and representative for Birmingham;' and the arrest for sedition that followed, and the sentence of imprisonment he was still undergoing while Southey wrote, interest no one now. But we all of us know still too well what generally had characterised that infamous year of Six-acts and Peterloo-riots, to be very tolerant of the eagerness of one of its radical heroes thus to make terms with Castlereagh for a trip out of jail into Italy as a spy and informer in even the interest of the unfortunate queen. Landor saw the thing apparently in that light, and cared no longer to remember what once he had been so ready to relate of her alleged amusements on the Lake of Como. Whether strictly she were guilty or innocent had in truth ceased to be

the question by this time. The great body of the people had declared upon her side; and whatever Landor's former statements or the use made of them might have been, he was now, in what he sent to one of her hottest partisans in society, to be published by her most powerful advocate in the press, guilty of nothing for which he had call to be ashamed. In a word, he flatly refused to give information of the secrets of bedchambers or writing-desks, and desired that in future a Mr. Walter ' Landon might not be united with a Sir Ch. Wolseley.'

At the same time he wrote to Southey:

'I lament that Parr should take so active a part in favour of that woman. Never did I entertain a doubt of her guilt and infamy; but those wretches are more guilty and more infamous who employ false keys in bedrooms and escritoires. Such is the intelligence we read here of the Milan committee. God forbid that any Englishman should have employed this Ompteda on so scandalous and abominable an action. Had Brougham's brother entered my house, the interview would have been short, and both standing. I admire the impudence of Wolseley. He attempted to defend the doings of the princess; but never hinted a thought of her innocence when I constantly represented her what all Italy knows her to be, not indeed with legal proofs (such are almost impossible in similar cases), but according to all appearances year after year. Yet if a court of justice called on me to give evidence, I should give my evidence according to the orders and spirit of our laws, and say that, not knowing her guilty, I am not authorised to prejudice her: proofs alone constitute guilt.'

In the same letter he describes some of the results of the Holy Alliance, then in full action on the Continent; and says he has been trying his hand against it in an oration written in Italian. He finishes with an objection to Peter Bell.

'... In whatever Wordsworth writes there is admirable poetry; but I wish he had omitted all that precedes "There was a time" (p. 9) in Peter Bell. The first poet that ever wrote was not a more original poet than he is, and the best is hardly a greater.'

One may see a little personal weakness in that objection. A whole half of the famous prologue he would have dropped, and among the lines so condemned are these:

'Swift Mercury resounds with mirth,
Great Jove is full of stately bowers;

But these, and all that they contain,

What are they to that tiny grain,
That little earth of ours?'

J

Very much were they still, just now indeed the little earth itself not nearly so much, to a man who lived his life in the remote far more than in the near; whose mind habitually dwelt in those regions of imagination which the homelier poet here designedly had abandoned; who in his ardour for classic forms was even ready to restrict himself to classic speech; and whose volume of poems and idyls about ancient deities and heroes, composed in one of the languages of antiquity and dispatched to England before that letter was written, reached Keswick almost at the very time when Peter Bell and his adventures with his ass made their entrance into Pisa. Southey was writing at the time the preface to his Vision of Judgment, in which he made his onslaught on the satanic school, and a passage from Landor's Latin essay came in with apt enforcement of his bitter charges against Byron. Yet not in Latin essay or Latin poems could he take delight. At both, as at his friend's objection to the Wordsworth prologue, he doubtless gravely shook his head, and gave expression once again to his never-ceasing regret that Landor could write so well in a language not comparable to his own. His next letter bears date the 8th of February 1821, and its closing reference must be given.

'Your letter was inserted in the Times. Some parts of it you would have altered if you had seen fair statements of the case. The madness is now abating; still, this is the time for the Catholics to attempt the reestablishment of their religion; for if the people of England choose to have such a queen, they cannot possibly object to the whore of Babylon. Our ministers want decision and firmness; but I believe it is not possible for men to act with better intentions, nor more uprightly. The Whigs are acting as basely as they did in the days of Titus Oates. God bless you.'

Landor replied on the 12th of March, and refers to another child, a daughter, recently born to him. This event had been announced to his mother on the 6th of the March preceding (1820) as having taken place at seven o'clock that evening. It 'is the custom at Pisa to carry the children to be baptised the very day of their birth, but I shall not pay any attention to 'such foolery.' He cannot but express his difference from his friend both as to emancipation and reform.

'I entertain no fear whatever that the woman of Cernobbio will introduce her sister of Babylon. That bloated ringdropper, that bastard of

milliner and perfumer, has long ago lost her charms for Englishmen. Surely it is absurd to deprive men of a seat in parliament because they believe in transubstantiation. It is quite enough if they swear that they will obey no person whatever in any act opposing the authority of king and parliament. I am firmly of opinion that no danger whatever can arise to England from the reception of the Catholics into parliament, nor (however odious the name has become) from a radical reform.'

He adds a rather striking passage about his oration against the Holy Alliance, in which he says he has expressed the danger to which all constitutional governments are exposed, and the inexpediency, not to say impossibility, of forming houses of lords.

'With due praises to the moral character of the English aristocracy, I have remarked that their two most memorable acts are their opposition to the repeal of the slave-trade, and their miserable weakness and indecision in the affair of the queen. I have observed that, to form a house of lords, materials are required which are not to be found anywhere in Europe, out of England, not even in Venice; that they must be of long growth, strong fibre, great girth, and well seasoned.'

That is one of his works of which there is now no trace, except in passages of his later dialogues; and the letter closes with mention of another of his perished undertakings. Upon the questions of poetry and criticism opened up in Wordsworth's prefaces, he had planned a Latin essay supplementary to the treatise prefixed to his Latin poems; and 'I have finished,' he tells Southey, my translation of Wordsworth's criticisms, saying in the preface that I had taken whatever I wanted from him, with the same liberty as a son eats and drinks in his 'father's house I wish,' he abruptly adds, 'I had some 'thousand pounds to spare, as I had when the Spaniards rose ' against Bonaparte, that what I offered to them I might offer 'to the Neapolitans.' The revolt at Naples, it is hardly necessary to add, was but one of the series of demands for representative government that arose in various parts of the Continent in that and the preceding year, and to which Landor's sympathy had been eagerly offered in orations' composed and printed in Italian, and circulated by him during the last weeks of his residence at Pisa. It was a natural reaction against the repressive system established on the fall of Napoleon, and, though in itself short-lived, was not without permanent results. Very soon thrust down again in Spain, in Portugal, in Naples, in Pied

1

mont, even in Turkey, to which the movement had extended, it led directly to the independence of Brazil, to the recognition by England of the South American republics, and to the Greek revolution. In the excitements caused by these events no man shared more largely than Landor.

III. ON THE WAY TO FLORENCE.

In April 1821, resolved not to pass that summer at Pisa, Landor had come to Florence in search of a house. A letter from his mother had reached him as he started on his journey, and from Florence he answered it. She had told him that there could not now be many more days for her at Ipsley, which would soon have to prepare for its new master. But he says nay to that, and prays that many more summers there may yet be hers.

The misery of not being able to see you is by far the greatest I have ever suffered. Never shall I forget the thousand acts of kindness and affection I have received from you from my earliest to my latest days. . . I have deferred the christening of my little daughter because I wished to have one to be named after you, and to whom I might request you to be godmother. As perhaps I may never have another, I shall call my little Julia by the name of Julia Elizabeth Savage Landor, and with your permission will engage some one of Julia's English friends to represent you. This is the first time I was ever a whole day without seeing Arnold. I wonder what his thoughts are upon the occasion. Mine are a great deal more about him than about the house I must look for. He is of all living creatures the most engaging, and already repeats ten of the most beautiful pieces of Italian poetry. . . . What a pity it is that such divine creatures should ever be men and subject to regrets and sorrows!'

Well might he so acknowledge the letter she had written to him, for it told him what the result had been of her always tender and proud thought of him. "Whenever I die, you will find by my will that the arrears which belong to me from the Llanthony property I have given up to you, as it may the sooner lessen your embarrassment; and I hope in time you 'will come and spend the remainder of your life in this country 'where you have many well-wishers, which some time or other you will be convinced of. By my retired way of living I have 'been enabled to provide comfortably for your sisters; and ' whenever I leave this world you will find your property im